BilmBlog500

Seen at Clearview's Chelsea Cinema, Auditorium #4, Saturday afternoon March 29, 2008. 3.5 Slithy Toads. This is the best movie of the year so far. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to read a review, good or bad, that reviews the movie on its own terms, divorced from its place in history following a string of (generally inferior) movies dealing with the Iraq war that have been box office disappointments. And also unfortunately, it seems to arrive at the moment when many critics have decided to drop grading these Iraq movies on a curve, giving plentiful extra points for worthy intentions, or even just for the bare bones of the subject matter, to things like In The Valley of Elah, which certainly had its share of negative reviews but also quite inexplicably managed to appear on many Top 10 lists. It's a double whammy, in which this really good movie is being victimized on multiple levels by the Critical Consensus, getting worse reviews than it deserves to compensate for films...

Author Jim C Hines tells us about his snow-filled adventure to visit the new Borders concept store .

So as we continue with the never-ending presidential election in the United States, the issue of tax cuts is certainly going to be one of those that's on the table. Do you soak the rich? Do you reduce taxes to increase revenue? An article in the NY Times on this subject a couple days ago , more to come I'm sure. Let us look at some of these questions through the prism of the profession of literary agent. Agents such as myself used to be called ten-percenters, because we took a 10% commission on the income we earned for our clients. That is no longer the case. In the book business, agents are now fifteen-percenters. The move toward a 15% commission started in the early 1990s. The move was not without its logic. It is safe to say that major bestselling authors are now paid far more than they were in the 1960s. Same in publishing as in movies or TV or sports or any profession. It is equally safe to say that the same cannot be said at the bottom end of the scale. Unlike...

Seen Easter Sunday March 23, 2008 @ the AMC Empire 25, auditorium #5. 3 Slithy Toads A surprisingly good teen sports film in the mold of the Karate Kid, with a likable cast and a smarter-than-average script that digs a little more deeply than the typical film of this ilk. It's the story of Jake Tyler, who is forced to leave his football stardom in Iowa behind when his younger brother gets a scholarship to an Orlando tennis academy. He can't leave behind the memories of his father, who died in a drunk driving accident which Jake survived in the passenger side. Why did he let his father drive? His sensitivity on this issue leads him to start a brawl during one of his football games, and internet footage of this brings him to to the attention of the mixed martial arts crowd at his new school. They want to fight him whether he wants to or not, leading up to a climatic brawl by way of the MMA gym operated by Djimon Hounsou. Jake is played by Sean Faris, who looks like Tom Crui...

Somewhat related to my last post, Pershing Square Capital is one of these big money firms that likes to come in with its wonderful ideas to enhance shareholder value. Sadly for me, they've decided to help ruin two companies where I've had a tiny bit of stock, Borders being one of them. If you own stock in a Pershing target, sell while you still have the chance. I'm generally suspicious of these "enhance shareholder value" ideas, which too often can be short-term fixes to boost the stock price with little regard for real long-term prospects. Certainly, loaning money to Borders at 12.5% interest is very helpful to Pershing Capital, but not to the rest of us. Where have they been while this cash crunch developed? At Wendy's, one of their great ideas to enhance shareholder value was for the company to spin off Tim Hortons to concentrate on the core business. Many of you in the US may not have heard of Tim's, but it is to Canada what McDonald's is to ...

So somehow or other Borders has managed to get itself into a deep cash crunch , is pursuing "strategic alternatives," which is Wall Street speak for praying for rescue, has seen its share price drop toward $5ish a share. It'll never happen until it's too late, but it's time for the board to admit it made a mistake in hiring George L. Jones to run the company, and to put him out on the street. I've been very ambivalent about George L. Jones for a long time. Big picture, he's seemed to have some good ideas. Chief among them: he stopped pouring money into wasteful store remodels; he did what needed to be done at Waldenbooks which had gone from being a cash generator 10 years ago to a cash drain; the new concept store idea was intriguing. Some ideas had potential but carried a lot of uncertainly, in particular the benefits of having your own web site instead of tying in with Amazon to allow better integration with the stores and the Borders Rewards progra...

I used to have a serious comic book habit. When I started my own business in 1994, time suddenly got a lot scarcer and it became hard to keep up. It was even harder to give up the idea of it, and I accumulated huge stacks of comics with the certainty I would read them some day, and then finally went cold turkey. I never read those stacks. Several years ago, around the time "Y" started with Vertigo, I decided I was missing my comic books too much, and I decided to pick up the habit again, the the conditions that I would average no more than a few comics a week, that I would read them all, and that I wouldn't read things out of force of habit if I wasn't liking them. I've done a pretty good job of sticking to it. With the exception of the meandering last year of "Y," I've rarely been patient for two bad issues in a row of anything. And though the books might get stacked up 4-6 weeks sometimes, I do read them. I buy the monthlies, because the co...

Once upon a a time there were the Big Three: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein. Andrew Wheeler, a much better blogger than I, offered some reflections on a look back in the NY Times Book Review at a week that saw two of them on the list. And now there are none. Those halcyon days of my youth when science fiction writers appeared on the list have been replaced by days in which fantasy writers appear. The sf writers that do, like William Gibson, often get that way with the help of a critical establishment that claims they no longer write sf, which was a very hard thing to do with the Big Three. Of the three, Clarke was the one I knew the least. I read lots of Asimov; the Foundation Trilogy was one of my first purchasers as a new member of the SF Book Club some 28 years ago. I read lots of Heinlein. Rather less, much less even, of Arthur C. Clarke. But his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey leaves me enough in his debt all by itself, and those 2001 royalties helped pay for my salary at the Sco...

Seen at Regal's Kaufman Astoria Stadium 14, auditorium #6, Monday evening March 17, 2008, 3.5 Slithy Toads, at least Edited and possibly over-edited to within an inch of its life, this caper film is based on the true story of a bank robbery in London in which a group of thieves tunneled into a safe deposit vault and escaped with several million dollars of loot. The film ties this in to dirty pictures of Prince Margaret, a Tunisian black power activist, the uprooting of many Scotland Yard cops bribed by a porn kingpin, and more As with many movies based on true stories, my curiosity regarding the extent to which any of it is true battles with my desire to enjoy the movie as a movie and ignore any and all questions of its veracity. It's definitely a movie that grows as it goes. The beginning was too me a little too brisk, a little too flashy, a little too much work honestly, as it introduces all of the many players bang bang bang. And there are many, many players. Half a doz...

Seen at Clearview's Chelsea Cinema; auditorium #1, Sunday March 16, 2008; 2 Slithy Toads, maybe So I should have listened to Stanley Kauffmann on this one. Over the years, this long-time film critic for The New Republic has been my compadre; the one critic more than any other who speaks to my own tastes in movies. It was bitter solace when I was writing film reviews for The Michigan Daily in college, ran up in my final semester against an editor who did not appreciate me, and saw Stanley Kauffmann pick up on some of the same things in his review of Compromising Positions that I had mentioned in a spiked review of the movie. Which as I recall was replaced with one that ended with a line about seltzer in pants. And Stanley Kauffmann gave a thumbs-down on Paranoid Park. But..., the reviews were all over the map, I kind of liked the coming attraction, the release broadened from theatres where I didn't have discount tickets to one where I did, there haven't been a lot of mo...

Peter V. Brett linked me up with this . Robin Hobb makes a very good point, which is that you can lose many hours to doing different stuffs, blogging among them, on the internet from the comfort of your own home while other possible things you can do (working/writing/movie/stroll/visit-w-friends etc.) don't get done. But wasn't it always thus? You can watch Survivor and see people every season on some beach with nothing to do, and who still manage to find things to do other than the necessary nothing. That's the point which I think Robin Hobb is missing. Some people, Brandon Sanderson or John Scalzi or others might big-time, will talk about how blogging helps to knit a close community with them and their readers. Maybe it does. I have a day job; I haven't posted in a few days because the day job has kept me busy. There are other people in the world who would have let the day job slide so they could post and comment and monitor comments and whatever. I don'...

One of the responses to the Borders post makes me ask: where an author knows that a particular book or series is much more likely to be found at a particular chain, should they maybe say so on their web site? Save gas, support the stores that are supporting them, that kind of thing? May not always be one-sided in favor of one chain over the other; Elizabeth Moon can direct people to Borders for the Deed of Paksenarrion trade paperback, to B&N for The Speed of Dark trade paperback, and to both for the Speed of Dark mass market. But do you all know that the new Borders web site which will soon be replacing their Amazon arrangement, allows you to check in-store availability of any book? And that the B&N web site does the same? At B&N, there is a "Check Store Availability" box right on the search results page. At Borders, one click further since you need (at least right now) to select the title, and can then find the Store Search feature. Ed could have re...

Borders has announced the first major change to result from the opening of its first new concept store in Ann Arbor a few weeks ago. One part of their revamped approach was to stock fewer titles, allowing a higher percentage of those fewer titles to be displayed. And now today's Wall Street Journal reports that this experiment was so immediately successful in increasing the # of books they actually sold that they're in this for the long haul. All of their stores will start to have fewer titles, with more of them faced out, with title count reductions in the 5-10% range, with the genre fiction section perhaps seeing a smaller reduction than some of the non-fiction categories. What does this mean? Is it possible to separate your reaction to this from your reaction to the new concept store approach in general? Where you go to a bookstore to find fewer books, but can research your ancestry and make photo albums and download a book to your Sony Reader, but find fewer books. You...

Seen at the Museum of the Moving Image, Riklis Theatre, at a preview screening on Thursday March 6, 2008. 3.5 Slithy Toads I hadn't heard much about this movie before the screening invitation arrived, and I don't think I knew anything about the director at all, but with a very reliable cast that includes Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Pierce Brosnan and Rachel McAdam, how bad could it be? And the night was open on my calendar, and the price (free) was right. More than worth it; it's not a great movie but it's more than passable. SInce this is an indie release that may not get everywhere, a quickie synopsis. It's set in 1949, in Seattle but could be pretty much any place, and Chris Cooper is a salaryman who'd like to leave his wife (Clarkson) for the alluring McAdam. He shares this news with his friend Pierce Brosnan, who narrates, and Brosnan tells us that he quickly has his eyes set on getting McAdam for himself. Cooper decides it would be kinder to po...

Can anyone explain why there seems to be such a big gap in the use of computer technology between US and UK businesses, even when they're owned by the same conglomerate? In my business, this is most notable with regard to royalty statements. For many years now, most US publishers have been producing royalty statements that are quite detailed. Almost everyone gives you the important information: how many copies the publisher shipped, how many copies were returned by bookstores, and how many of the copies that are left "in the field" are being held as a reserve against possible future returns. In some instances, the publishers almost seem to have this gleeful "you want information, you've got information" approach, and manage to provide this information over three or five pages of stunningly incomprehensible statements. It's a dozen years or more with some publishers that this information has been provided. And somehow, the British publishers are st...

This week saw the death of Leonard Rosenman, who won an Academy Award for his work adapting the musical score for Stanley Kubrick's classic Barry Lyndon, among many other film score credits. Most of Rosenman's movies were, as the saying goes, before my time, and before the age of film music by Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams and John Barry that I consider classic, but there's no denying the power of his cv. He was a major influence on films and film music. And Barry Lyndon is an utter masterpiece, one of the Kubrick movies that I simply need to see in a theatre every three or five years to re-make my acquaintance. Music is an important part of its power. The screening I saw of the new movie Married Life (post to come) was the final program at the Riklis Theatre of the Museum of the Moving Image , which is embarking on a major expansion and renovation that will see the Riklis demolished. I won't miss it a bit. It was designed and built in the mid-to-late 1980s, ...

Seen at the Atlantic Theatre at the 3PM Matinee, Sunday March 2, 2008. No Slithy Toads This is the newest play from the British dramatist Jez Butterworth, and of special interest to JABberwockonians, one of the three actors in it is Chris Bauer, who will have a recurring role as Andy Bellefleur in " True Blood ," the Alan Ball - HBO TV series based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by my client Charlaine Harris .  I can't shed much light on how that will work out.  True Blood:  Southern police detective.  Parlour Song:  British blower-upper.  The accents are, like, totally different. I like to see plays during the end of previews, during the time the press might be taking a look to have their reviews ready to go at the official opening.  So when the review of Parlour Song appeared in The New York Times on Thursday, I knew what I was reading about.  I was rather dumbfounded to find out that Ben Brantley actually liked the play, but then reading on in the review it becomes ...

Seen on DVD, on my HUGE screen (20") on Tuesday March 4. No Slithy Toads I didn't quite know what to do with this when it had its theatrical release. I like Brad Pitt, it was very serious minded, it certainly seemed Worthy of Being Seen. But it was a long movie. The reviews were all over the map from "there be dragons" to you must must must see it. I ended up not seeing it in the theatres, but I felt guilty about it in a way I very rarely and hardly ever do. So I did something I do hardly ever, and I promised myself I'd look at the DVD. Thank you, Queens Borough Public Library. And I am SO glad I didn't pay for this in the theatre. To be sure, you never know how something might play differently in a big theatre vs. a TV at home; there are movies I've loved more than I should have because I saw them at the Loews Astor Plaza. But I can't see this as one of them. Nothing happens. Lots of pretty scenery to look at. But NOTHING HAPPENS. I deci...

Seen Sunday March 2, 2008 @ the Reading/City Cinemas Angelika Film Center, Aud. #5, 30-35 people, 2 Slithy Toads. My sister made me do it, and I wish she hadn't. The coming attraction for this movie looked very flat to me, and the reviews hadn't overcome my reservations, but my sister said nice things, and the 2nd week box-office suggested it was getting some nice word of mouth. Well, not from me. In Hebrew, Arabic and English with subtitles. Egyptian police band octet comes to Israel for concert in Petah Tikvah, ends up in Beit Hatikva instead, spends the night, they sleep, I fall asleep 3/4 of the way through. Next.

Seen Sunday March 2, 2008 @ the Reading/City Cinemas Angelika Film Center, Aud. #2, 200+ people, 4.5 Slithy Toads This was a movie that hadn't been on my radar at all until I started to read the overall excellent reviews in the NYC papers when it opened a couple of weeks ago, and then totally got on my radar after winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. It's worthy. In Austrian with sub-titles, the film is about a group of Nazi prisoners with special skills who are assigned the task of first counterfeiting the British pound and subsequently the US dollar during the closing year of World War II in order to help the faltering German war effort. We've all seen Holocaust movies before, ranging from the sublimely good (Schindler's List, which this is similar to in some ways) to the entirely superfluous (The Pianist). This one has a fresh story to tell, and it does it very very well. Should the counterfeiters help the Nazis to help themselves? Should they hinde...

Seen Sunday March 2, 2008 @ the AMC Loews 34th St. 14, screen #14, 15-20 people. 3 Slithy Toads This hadn't been on my list to see, but my younger brother said he and my nephews had liked, and so why not... with AMC's AMCinema program it's only $6. I haven't read the books, can't say I even want to. You've got most of the basic ingredients of a kids fantasy, with a likable family with family problems that can be solved over the course of 90 minutes, and basic if uninspired fantasy elements. The family moving into mysterious house is a fixture of kids fantasies and also of many horror novels. You've got some big negatives. The kids occasionally go too far in the direction of doing idiotic things because the plot requres but which go beyond even the usual level of stupid things that kids will do. The ending has some total off moments; why bother bringing Lucy back to the house as an 86-year-old looking like Rose returning to the Titanic if you're ju...